experience of large database schemas under Dia?

  • Thread starter Thread starter bugbear
  • Start date Start date
B

bugbear

Has anybody successfully used autodia and dia to work
on a "decent size" database schema?

http://droogs.org/autodia/
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/

By decent size I'm thinking of 30-50 tables, with between
10 and 50 columns each. I've only seen trivial
datasets in the demo files and screenshots for
both pieces of software.

I've used Visio to do this in the past, but would
like to move away from Micro$oft.

BugBear
 
Has anybody successfully used autodia and dia to work
on a "decent size" database schema?

http://droogs.org/autodia/
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/

By decent size I'm thinking of 30-50 tables, with between
10 and 50 columns each. I've only seen trivial
datasets in the demo files and screenshots for
both pieces of software.

I've used Visio to do this in the past, but would
like to move away from Micro$oft.

BugBear
Click to expand...

Have not used these, though I'm always on the look out for such
documentation aids. I have seen tools/scripts for some DBs that are
meant to generate basic diagrams using DIA. Depends on you DB and
scripting language, of course.

For just the graphics look at XFig. You might even get lucky and find
an automation script to drive it from schema info. I've not checked
in awhile.

By my standards your 30-50 tables is a pretty small db. For these I
usually find it faster to just dump the meta-tables, load them into a
spreadsheet, and reformat/re-arrange things. I tend to _heavily_
comment this sort of documentation and find auto/template generated
layouts require lots of hand manipulation anyway.

You might also look at umbrello if you're using a new KDE (3.2)
release. May need a couple more release cycles before it's ready for
the big time. Looks good though.

If you're using one of the popular DBs you may find something that
will generate html based on meta-tables or even ddl scripts to which
you could add your own boxes/arrows etc., if need be.

As for _generating_ ddl scripts _from_ uml -- haven't found anything I
really like considering the amount of time it takes for the results.
Even things like Erwin have sizable holes and blind spots.

hth,
prg
email above disabled
 
As for _generating_ ddl scripts _from_ uml -- haven't found anything I
really like considering the amount of time it takes for the results.
Even things like Erwin have sizable holes and blind spots.
Click to expand...

Actually, there's a script that can take Dia diagrams and generate DDL
out of it that works pretty well.

Unfortunately, it doesn't give a full-scale reverse-engineering tool,
as the only thing that will take SQL to Dia is Rod Taylor's tool, and
it handles neither foreign key relationships nor does it do anything
about table layout.
 
MySql

Have not used these, though I'm always on the look out for such
documentation aids. I have seen tools/scripts for some DBs that are
meant to generate basic diagrams using DIA. Depends on you DB and
scripting language, of course.

For just the graphics look at XFig. You might even get lucky and find
an automation script to drive it from schema info. I've not checked
in awhile.

By my standards your 30-50 tables is a pretty small db. For these I
usually find it faster to just dump the meta-tables, load them into a
spreadsheet, and reformat/re-arrange things. I tend to _heavily_
comment this sort of documentation and find auto/template generated
layouts require lots of hand manipulation anyway.

You might also look at umbrello if you're using a new KDE (3.2)
release. May need a couple more release cycles before it's ready for
the big time. Looks good though.

If you're using one of the popular DBs you may find something that
will generate html based on meta-tables or even ddl scripts to which
you could add your own boxes/arrows etc., if need be.

As for _generating_ ddl scripts _from_ uml -- haven't found anything I
really like considering the amount of time it takes for the results.
Even things like Erwin have sizable holes and blind spots.

hth,
prg
email above disabled
Click to expand...
 
Martha Stewart called it a Good Thing when derek / nul said:
MySql
Click to expand...

And what did you think the question was? I wouldn't think that the
answer was a proprietary database engine...
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